CLAY SHIRKY: I said it then, I believe it now. I think the concern for how other people think about you is one of the sources of essentially work paralysis among women.
One of the big skills that you need, and my institution does not do a good job of inculcating this in women – there are not enough institutions that do – one of the big skills is to be able to do what you want to do without caring what other people think.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You have to acknowledge the fact that when women put themselves out there, they’re called “biatches.” The word “shrill” is applied to them. They are not called “leaders.” They are not called “strong.”
CLAY SHIRKY: That is right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: They’re called “strident – hags.”
CLAY SHIRKY: Yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And it’s a pain in the – butt.

Yes it is. And I’ll tell you why. There is more than one way for people to think about you, and some kinds of indifference are easier than others. Gladstone and Shirky sum up that difference very briskly in that brief passage. Allow me to explain. It is one thing to be considered – however disapprovingly – tough and aggressive and strong and ballsy. It is another to be considered a shrill strident hag bitch.

That’s all there is to it, really. That’s why Gladstone says it’s a pain in the ass. Yes it damn well is. Being considered strong and tough is not all that unpleasant even if the people who consider you that detest you. Being considered a shrill strident hag bitch is a whole different thing. And what Gladstone says is no lie: it takes very little for people to call a woman a bitch – or, as we have seen, shrill and strident.

So women can’t win no matter what they do. Either they hang back and don’t get the top jobs because they didn’t grab for them, or they grab for the top jobs and spend the rest of their lives as shrill strident hag bitches.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You write, “Women aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks, they are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.”

Okay – I do better with that one. I’m very very very good at behaving like an anti-social obsessive. I’m a *genius at that. Top of the class. And I’m not too bad at the pompous blowhard thing, and I do a fair bit of the self-promoting narcissism routine too.

CLAY SHIRKY: I’ll tell you though, the reaction that has surprised me most is that any number of people, many of them women, have come forward and said, essentially, women have a different way of getting along in the world, we’re more social, we’re more nurturing, and so forth.
And I have two problems with that attitude. The first is, essentially, that if you flowered up the language a little bit, you could dump that into a Victorian almanac.
And the second is that all of that kind of nurturing, social junk imagines that the best role we can imagine for women in the workplace is as kind of middle-management mommies, right?

God yes. I squawked when I heard that part. I squawked and I threw some things. It drives me crazy when women buy into that crap.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: In your view, what is the impact of having so many more male voices as experts and sources than women?
CLAY SHIRKY: I think one of the big impacts is that the male voice is what expertise comes to sound like. And so, even from someone who doesn’t go in with a formally sexist bias about whether men are more expert than women in general, you may just unconsciously flip through to those parts of the rolodex.
Someone somewhere has to say, we have to change the fact of the representation before we change people’s mental model of what expertise sounds like because if we just wait, we will always lag the cultural change rather than leading it.

The male voice is what expertise comes to sound like – that is exactly it.

Just for one thing, who is this someone? Who is this someone whose opinion I value at zero? I don’t know who that is.

For another thing, I’m not talking solely about what “someone” thinks of me – I’m talking about, for instance, what people write about me. Why do I care even slightly about that? Think hard, and maybe you can figure it out.

Now that’s not to say that I do care all that much about anyone and everyone who writes sexist shit about me. I don’t. But I do think it’s interesting to note what kinds of things people allow themselves to say and type and immortalize on the internets; I do think it tells us interesting (and fairly nauseating) things about how some people view women.

At any rate, even if I did care all that much about anyone and everyone who writes sexist shit about me, why would that be odd? Would you brush it off so easily if the issue were racism or anti-Semitism? I don’t know, maybe you would, but if so I would wonder why.

<blockquote>At any rate, even if I did care all that much about anyone and everyone who writes sexist shit about me, why would that be odd? Would you brush it off so easily if the issue were racism or anti-Semitism? I don’t know, maybe you would, but if so I would wonder why.</blockquote>

I think it’s odd that you accord any weight whatsoever to the opinions of idiots. If a Nazi read my posts on the previous topic and posted a rant full of nasty, vicious name-calling about me, I certainly wouldn’t give it a second thought. Well, actually, I probably wouldn’t read it at all, so I wouldn’t give it a first thought.

Grade-school sayings keep running through my mind… “sticks and stones”, “consider the source”, and so on. I don’t care what some random moron thinks or says about me, and I don’t know why you do, either.

Of course, some might argue that that’s because I’m a white male heterosexual, so it’s hard to come up with any hateful things to call me. Or perhaps someone could come up with something they considered hateful, but it wouldn’t have any effect on me or on my self image. I suppose someone could call me a honkie male chauvinist pig mother fucker, but that wouldn’t bother me in the slightest. I’d find it amusing.

Of course, I’m much harder to offend than most people. The last person who offended me did so with a 2X4, literally. I think by allowing bitch/slut/cunt type garbage to bother you, you’re just giving nasty people a weapon to distract you. Why would you care at all about the opinions or statements of someone who thinks in such terms?

Of course, some might argue that that’s because I’m a white male heterosexual, so it’s hard to come up with any hateful things to call me.

That’s exactly what I’d say, but I’d go further. As a white heterosexual male, you have no idea – none – what it’s like to live with the social consequences of being a member of a stigmatized group. It’s not just what “some people say about you.” It’s the entire social apparatus that gets propped up by such widespread sentiments. The social acceptability of denying women equal pay for equal work, or passing them over for promotions because they’re cunts, not “strong, assertive leaders.” The fact that gays can be fired in many states just for being gay, or their marriage rights can be taken away (remember Prop 8?), a campaign stoked by ugly, vicious, lying rhetoric.

You, Mr. Thompson, know nothing about that. And instead of actively trying to think through it, and instead of trying to empathize with people in that situation, you glibly dismiss these concerns. You are the very literal embodiment of smug privilege, and your unexamined pronouncements are offensive.

Robert, you’re being obtuse. Part of the point is that it’s not just idiots who talk about women that way. There’s a much much much lower threshold for throwing dung at women than there is for other categories of people. Lots of people passionately insist that racist epithets are fundamentally different from sexist epithets.

Another part of the point is that being called a honkie male chauvinist pig mother fucker is a different kind of thing from being called a cunt (since you mentioned the word), just as being called strong and tough is a different kind of thing from being called a strident bitch. If you don’t get that – well you’ve kind of put your own self in the category of idiots about whose opinions I shouldn’t care in the slightest. Do you see how complicated this is?

Another part of the point is that, just as you say, I hate it when people who aren’t subject to a particular kind of verbal warfare tell people who are subject to it to shrug it off. It’s presumptuous. And I bet you wouldn’t make this suggestion to non-white people subject to racist epithets, and if I’m right about that, you’re just making my point for me.

“Sticks and stones,” by the way, is one of the stupidest and most callous bromides I know of. It’s a loathsome saying. Tell that to the children in Goldenbridge who were constantly told that they had killed Jesus. Or rather, don’t.

Really, I’d drop it if I were you, Robert. It’s just never a winning move for people in a privileged category to try to tell people in a stigmatized category how to react to being stigmatized. It just isn’t.

And it looks like boasting. “I can rise above all that kind of thing, why are you so pathetic?” Really. It’s an unpleasant mix of conceit and contempt. Not persuasive.

Shades of much earlier discussions here. Oh my, people simply don’t get it do they? It’s amazing how dense people can be. Sorry Robert, you have no idea. This discussion has been going on here for some time. People have been banned from certain web sites – why? – because they take exception to the sexist epithets that are casually taken for granted.

Just look at it on a global scale. When was the last time you saw a woman speaking with authority from the Vatican? From Saudi Arabia? From Iran? That pattern holds. It’s a cultural given practically everywhere, and so women are often forced into the role of the nurturing, networking incompetent, and many of them buy into it, a kind of reflex defensiveness. Women are different. They’re less cerebral, less discursive, much more metaphorical, ‘metaphysical’ (in a mythic-poetic way), intellectually soggy. (I can’t think of his name, but someone wrote an awful book about the godness, and how language – language, mind you! – was basically masculine. I knew a woman who bought into it, and used to speak in this breathless way about all these spongy things, like godesses and the unique perspective, mentality, of the woman.)

You’d find amusing anything said about you because you start from a position of strength. Of course, call you any sort of names you like, they’d never hurt you, because they can’t. You’re immune. As Josh says, you haven’t bothered to try thinking it through, probably because you don’t have to. That’s pretty sick. Admit it! You’re part of the problem that Ophelia is addressing here. And you still don’t get it! Well, of course you don’t. That’s the problem!

Thanks for this riveting discussion. Clay Shirky is a fine name and his case is well-put. The things people say about those in stigmatized categories are simply one element of lots of bad and unfair stuff that gets done to people in stigmatized categories. It also maintains and dare I say reproduces the stigmatization. That’s one reason we should pay attention to it even if we think others are idiots. It’s not about individual, fabulous, center o’the universe moi. It’s about all of us.

In my life as a professor, the comments of people whose opinions should not matter much to me actually get my attention because if I want a promotion or a merit raise, I have to present (mostly) not-negative student evaluations. They do not have to be glowing student evaluations. They simply can’t be negative.

I am as non-nurturing a professor as I can be while showing interest in students’ thinking and ideas, and pushing them to think a little bit, and getting them to read and write. I try to act as much like a man professor as I can, as silly as that is, because how do I know how a man professor feels inside? I don’t. But I am not going to be their nurturing mommy. On their evaluation forms, students will concede that they learned something in the course, that I was prepared and have expertise in my field, and then will comment that I am “mean.” Last quarter I got, for the first time, “brash.” I think women professors who are not nurturing or who do not act like students think women professors ought to act (like mommies or pushovers) get called “mean.” Strident and hag are not in their vocabularies yet.

“I’m very very very good at behaving like an anti-social obsessive. I’m a *genius at that. Top of the class.” Makes two of us . . . just got roundly and patronisingly insulted on facebook by some guy for being arrogant and intolerant, we all have our opinions, etc etc etc. When in actual fact I’m very unsure of myself! So I get the insults, but not the self-confidence. At least my skin is growing thicker every day. Now I am going to redouble my efforts at blowhard pomposity!

Robert, just read you’re “now I feel stigmatised” comment. Ugh. Callous superficial ignorance can’t be “stigmatised:” it’s either recognised for what it is or it’s not. You can’t stigmatise something which is already undesirable, whereas stigmatising outspoken and strong women is a different kettle of fish, because there is nothing undesirable about outspoken and strong women. Josh and Ophelia showed explained clearly how this stigmatisation plays out for real women in the real world: it keeps them subordinate to men. And if you think that doesn’t matter . . . well what the hell are you doing commenting here?

Robert, thank you. Not because I agree with you – I don’t. But I thank you for expressing the thought that comes to mind so easily when you haven’t thought this thing through, and thereby provoking answers that explains the problem so very well. I thank you because I have been tending to think the same way myself, and after the exchange above, I now understand better why that is wrong. I hope you too will “get it” one of these days.

You really just don’t get it. I don’t know what to say to people who are determined to make themselves victims.

You say “determined to make themselves victims” as though people have a choice. What you don’t seem to get is that we don’t have any choice about how others see us, and if that view of theirs unjustly determines or limits our careers, our freedoms and our self-esteem, then we are victims, whatever we actually want.

There is an underlying problem, of course, which is that these “male-pattern” behaviours ARE wrong. They tend towards dishonesty in any number of ways, and they are certainly disrespectful and inconsiderate of other perspectives. They are certainly FORMALLY disapproved-of by all kinds of management and other workplace-relations training, even if informally they are still valorised in practice.

So while it is good to note that women lose out either by not performing them or by the second-order gendered critique that results if they try, it should also be good to note that, as is the case with feminism in general, the point is not to be able to join in a world gendered masculine, but to not have to. To have a better world which ceases to valorise these essentially negative and aggressive behaviours.

Yes, I think that’s quite right. Further, I would say that it seems to me that our traditional moral assumptions have arisen from animal behaviour, and that promoting human rights is what will enable us to get away from instinct-based morality (especially if we can thereby persuade people out of the primitive but determined association between tribal religion and morality). People’s demands for rights can make us more aware of what we do, think, and feel. Consciousness-raising can enable us to become more distinctively human.

This, I think, is why when you get atheist conventions so many of the speakers are the same guys as were at the last atheist convention, making it look like a boys club.

It isn’t anything to do with atheism, it is everything to do with women being way under-represented as experts and leaders, with those who are represented being caste in as unflattering a light as is humanly possible. A woman gets called a strident bitch hag for the exact same behaviour that a guy will get called a natural leader.

That is not to say you don’t get assholes of both genders – but it seems like women get called names as a way to shut them up more than as a response to them actually acting like assholes.

It isn’t something conscious, it is our entire history conditioning us towards something that is basically, fundamentally wrong. And recognising that it is wrong is pretty damn hard, but then since when has being fair been easy?

There was some furore recently when the editor (make of course) of Radio 4′s Today program said the reason there were not more female presenters on the program was because women did not have thick-enough skin.

I don’t think this really follows on from the other comments, but what I find interesting is that the Shirky/ Gladstone dialogue does seem rather pessimistic, as if the existing male dominance is so entrenched and powerful that it’s just impossible for female voices to break through.

Yet that clearly is not the case. Certainly the past couple of centuries shows that the female voice is much more powerful (if not yet equal) now than before (probably than ever).

So change can, and has, happen(ed), which doesn’t seem to be acknowledged by either Shirky or Gladstone.

Yes, it is of course a fact that there are vastly more serious female journalists at work in broadcast news than there were a generation ago, even if the factor of their ‘tottiness’ still lingers in occasional comments like an unwelcome ghost at their professional feast. But from Kirsty Wark to Rachel Maddow, they are there, accepted, and let us hope, well on the way to being an unquestioned norm.

[...] Ophelia Benson at Butterflies & Wheels points out that the “voice of expertise” and “self-aggrandizing jerk” have come to sound remarkably alike, to the detriment of many actual experts. She also mentions the catch-22 of women and work: either you hang back and lose out on big opportunities, or you squawk loudly and come off, as Brooke Gladstone at OTM puts it, like a bi-atch. Brooke rightly says “it’s a pain in the – butt.” The Mama Bee would not have been so kind. (That is why she is not an NPR host.) [...]

This, I think, is why when you get atheist conventions so many of the speakers are the same guys as were at the last atheist convention, making it look like a boys club.

Exactly. Now for the most obvious same guys, that’s reasonable and (probably) gender-neutral – they’re Names; they have atheist best-sellers along with existing conspicuous careers (Harris being the exception there, as the junior among them). But then once you go down a rung or two it becomes much less obvious why women are so scarce. Polly Toynbee, Katha Pollitt, Joan Smith, Wendy Kaminer, Susan Jacoby – they are Names too.

“You say “determined to make themselves victims” as though people have a choice. What you don’t seem to get is that we don’t have any choice about how others see us, and if that view of theirs unjustly determines or limits our careers, our freedoms and our self-esteem, then we are victims, whatever we actually want.”

Oh, I get it just fine. My point is that I don’t care what others think of me, and that those who do care what other random people think of them are simply voluntarily putting themselves in a weak position. They are allowing themselves to be victimized.

In the US, at least, women have full equality, both by law and in practice. Women have had the vote for nearly 100 years and control most of the wealth. In an apples-to-apples comparison, women are paid at least equally, and by some studies actually earn slightly more than men on average for the same work. Women are now well-represented in nearly all fields that were previously dominated by men, including the law, medicine, journalism, and academia.

As to being heard, I can’t imagine that I’m alone in spending more time reading and watching what women have to say on topics that interest me (OB, Zomgitschriss, xxxThePeachxxx, etc.) than I do on listening to men. (About the only male atheists I spend time on are PZ, Jerry Coyne, and Russell Blackford.)

Self-esteem? I think that’s an internal thing. It’s a truism that boys usually have a higher opinion of their abilities than reality justifies, and girls are the opposite. Perhaps there’s a biological basis for that. But everyone is solely responsible for his or her own self-esteem. If you let what others think affect your self-esteem, you have only yourself to blame.

If PZ and I let each other’s opinions affect our self-esteem, for example, we’d both be shriveled puddles. I respect him as a scientist and an atheist, and I’m sure the converse is also true. But politically we’re so far apart we can’t even see each other. I think he’s a whacko liberal and he thinks I’m a whacko libertarian. We’ve both said some incredibly nasty things to each other on political issues, but what he said hasn’t affected my self-esteem and I can’t imagine that anything I’ve said has reduced PZ’s opinion of himself. Which is as it should be.

What utter nonsense, Robert. I have to care what others think of me because they decide whether or not they hire me. They decide whether or not they listen to me–and I want others to listen to me. They decide whether or not they promote me. They decide whether or not they give me a raise.

Also, you’re making a lot of false claims about the facts. For instance: “In the US, at least, women have full equality, both by law and in practice. Women have had the vote for nearly 100 years and control most of the wealth.”

Really? In practice? How? Control most of the wealth? Do you have a cite for that?

It doesn’t really work to say you get the point only to go on to say things that demonstrate that you don’t get it at all. We understand that your point is that you don’t care what others think of you, but our point is that that’s not the point. (I say “we” and “our” because other comments seem to be in agreement, which to a hostile eye could be called a deadening consensus, not to say groupthink; I don’t say it to convey a sense of us v The Other, which I really don’t want to do, and I would say “I” here, except the quoted passage is Gordon’s, so I can’t; anyway apologies for the bullying note of “we”; I don’t intend it that way.)

That’s not the point because it’s psychological, and the issue is social. I am quite capable of letting sexist insults wash over me, and I often do, but that is not the only issue. How I Feel is not the only question here. The overarching question is social and political, not psychological and individual.

Your factual claims refer to some other planet, so I can’t address them, because I don’t have access to that planet’s records.

I thought we were discussing intellectual discourse rather than job interviews. If you want your employer to think highly of you, or your family and friends, fine. That’s normal. What I was talking about was the ridiculously high level of concern some people have for the opinions of people they have not met and never will meet and who have no possible direct control over one’s success or failure.

As to women controlling the wealth, I’ll let you look it up yourself. Basically, wealth correlates strongly with age. Women live considerably longer than men, on average, so most of the wealth in this country is controlled by elderly widows.

See, Ophelia, that’s why I read your postings every day, along with those of PZ and several other extreme liberals. The group-think thing is only to be expected, as liberal blogs tend to attract almost exclusively liberal readers, just as conservative or libertarian blogs tend to attract only conservative or libertarian readers.

I disagree vehemently with your world view, and that of most of the people who post here and on PZ’s, Coyne’s, and Laden’s blogs, but I think it’s pointless to immerse myself in a sea of people who share my opinions. Every once in a great while, I’ll even decide I was wrong about something and the liberal or conservative folks were right.

I think much of the divisiveness that currently plagues the country results from liberals spending all their time listening to other liberals, conservatives to conservatives, and libertarians to libertarians. This is producing a them-against-us mindset where anyone who is not your friend becomes your enemy.

Hmm, let’s check some statistics, shall we? Wikipedia handily tabulates info on ‘household net worth’ from the Federal Reserve by age of head-of-household. Taking 2004 figures, at 35-44 the mean is $299,000; at 55-64 it is $843,000; but at 65-74 it falls to $690,000, and at 75+ to $528,000. SO even if ALL the households with a head over 75 were led by widows, your argument fails on the facts.

Here is where the internationalism of t’Internet comes into play. From where I’m standing OB isn’t an “extreme liberal” at all, and indeed in the circles I move in that isn’t a meaningful descriptor, so it would be hard for me to think of her that way. To agree with someone in some areas does not require agreement in others, which makes the idea of groupthink problematic. For example I find both Nick Cohen and Norman Geras to be buffoons while OB takes them at their own estimation. That doesn’t stop me from reading and enjoying this blog – so what is this groupthink thing of which you speak?

To agree with someone in some areas does not require agreement in others, which makes the idea of groupthink problematic.

Just what I was about to say. I think things are too patchy here to fit neatly into boxes labeled ‘liberal’ ‘conservative’ and ‘libertarian.’ I’m patchy, and the readers are patchy. There is a good deal of agreeement (or groupthink, or consensus) on some issues, but it doesn’t sort tidily into exactly three slots.

Possibly the only real agreement/groupthink box is the one for universal human rights. I’m not going to apologize for that. I think that’s one, perhaps the one, issue where disagreement for the sake of disagreement is simply frivolous, if not sinister.

I do want to know what the arguments are for the other side, of course, and I have spent a good deal of time finding out. But I’m not very worried about local conformity on the subject.

There’s this thing that chavs do, where they go on about how they don’t care about what others think of them, and it’s supposed to make the audience think that they’re super K-mart special heroes. Eminem built his career on this persona. But even from a stereotypical white American male point of view, this is a pathetic and deranged way of going about life. I mean, when I think of John Wayne, the words “garrulous, oblivious, and aloof” don’t spring to mind. He cared — that’s what made him a confident hero instead of a vainglorious doofus.

Still, I think it’s true that apathy can be a source of strength, when and if you have the luxury of stoicism. The apathy just has to be apathy with the aim of following a moral law. Yet often that moral law, paradoxically, is: “Right institutional wrongs by shouting into a loudspeaker at dummies.”

Hahahaha – oh that’s a chav thing! That explains a lot. I know someone who never stops doing that. I don’t think he considers himself a chav, but he does call himself “ironic” a lot, so maybe he’s an ironic chav.

There is, frankly, something terribly erm not grown up about people who need to report on their own performance all the time – who can’t make a joke without saying “I’m amusing” or an argument without saying “I’m right.” Calling it irony doesn’t make it any more mahcherr.

Anyway – yes of course it’s silly to waste much attention on insults from strangers, but that was never what this was about, so saying that is not very germane.

On the face of it, the ironic hipsters are the plumb opposite of the chavs and juggalos and the rest. Irony advertises a pathological level of self-awareness, while chavvery advertises a pathological level of obliviousness. It might be more complicated for people like your friend, but for the cultural dopes in either crowd you can pretty much assume that their inner life is exactly like it says on the tin.

In any case, Captain Picard would not think highly of either, <a href=”http://picard.ytmnd.com/“>which is ultimately what matters</a>.

Oh no, you guys have lost me completely now. I haven’t the faintest idea what chavs and juggalos are. I think I can picture an ironic hipster, but it doesn’t help much. Is it just me showing my age? Or is it just because I am not American?

Noooooooo, I’m one of the oldest people in the world, and Ben is Canadian, and chavs are a UK thing. I don’t know what juggalos are either. Chavs – I don’t know – they were big the last time I was in the UK – especially in bookshops, and I was always going into bookshops, because it was when the Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense came out, and that was my first book ever, so I simply went lurching all around London collecting thrills at seeing it in different places. Putney! South Wimbledon! Camden Town! In sniffing around I was always finding chav books on the way to the Dictionary. But I might know about them anyway, I dunno, they seem to come up a lot.

Um, how could I forget, one can always google strange words these days. Most unenlightened I was by the results. (Hey, I spontaneously wrote a sentence that could have been uttered by Yoda! Maybe there is hope for me after all.)

<i>As to women controlling the wealth, I’ll let you look it up yourself. Basically, wealth correlates strongly with age. Women live considerably longer than men, on average, so most of the wealth in this country is controlled by elderly widows.</i>

BWAHAHAHAHAH!

Seriously? <i>Seriously?<i/>

For an actual logical response, see what Dave said. My only response is LOLOLOL!!!

The ‘voice of the expert’ is also, almost universally posh. On Newsnight, The Today Programme (or whatever your version), conferences, universitities, schools etc…. hearing a working class accent is rarer, and more surprising, than seeing a woman in a position of authority.

The ‘chav’ put down does the same job as ‘bitch’ – making sure that the people in question don’t get too uppity, reminding them who is boss, and who ought to remember their station in life. That it is bandied about in books, websites, discussions even more free and easily than bitch etc…just goes to show how deeply ingrained and acceptable this prejudice is.

As Ben says, one reaction to this is to adopt a posture of not caring what others think. This superficial arrogance shouldn’t be confused with the kind of deep self-confidence instilled in future leaders on the playing fields of Eton and suchlike, that Clay Shirky is talking about. It doesn’t travel well.

Actually, no they are not. Women on average earned about 76.5% of what men earned as at 2004. A 2005 study by Cornell University found that women were less likely to get hired and more likely to get a crummy salary in relation to their position.

Further, it actually doesn’t pay for a woman to be married – if you get married as a woman in the US you are likely to earn about 94.5% of the salary of your unmarried female counter-part.

The ‘voice of the expert’ is also, almost universally posh. On Newsnight, The Today Programme…

Hmm – really? How are you defining “posh”? The BBC is certainly no longer exclusively BBC-accented, or RP, or Home Counties, or whatever you want to call it. If it has an average accent that accent surely is estuary. But to American ears (mine anyway) it doesn’t have an average accent at all, it has a minestrone of regional accents, with more or less violently pinched vowels. (Many of its reporters talk about trewwwps instead of troops or even trewps. Some even talk about treeps.)

And that trope doesn’t really work in the US, because in most of the country there isn’t much if any different in accent (as opposed to syntax etc) between posh and non-posh.

And then there are questions about the connection between higher education and jobs in broadcasting and what effect that has on accents. In short, I’m not sure it’s a straight line between what BBC presenters sound like and working class representation.

Maya, you make an interesting point about class. It’s most definitely right. You don’t hear people with Bronx or Southie accents on the news. That’s pretty sad.

But I’m definitely not in agreement with how you’ve chosen to apply this point. “Chav” may have class connotations — what doesn’t? But its primary purpose is to describe young people who engage in anti-social behavior. Hence the use of words like “deranged” and “pathetic” from a stereotypical white male patriarch’s perspective, which was my initial point.

And, just to make things interesting for purposes of discussion, it’s use of language I would defend. For saying that use of morally loaded language to describe anti-social behavior is “blaming the victim” suggests that you advocate some kind of economic determinism at best (reductionism at worst). I reject that.

And this is a conviction that I apply with some consistency, without fear of being thought a “neo-snob” or what have you. Just as I condemned a close relative when he was arrested for grand theft auto, so I would condemn a stranger of the same age range for the same crime. After all, he grew up middle-class and made the worst of it.

I’m not sure it is all that sad that we don’t hear Bronx or Southie accents on the news. I think there’s a great deal to be said for a fairly uniform accent on the news, for the sake of ease of comprehension for a vast and motley audience which includes many for whom English is not a first language. That’s one reason I think the BBC’s minestrone actually does more to exclude than it does to include. It’s inclusive domestically (except for ESL speakers) but exclusive internationally.

Plus as I mentioned, the accent question is complicated by education and mobility (social and geographic). It just isn’t the case the people born and raised in the Bronx or South Boston invariably keep the accents they had at age 5. I think Barney Frank keeps his on purpose – pour encourager les autres – and that’s swell, but I don’t think it should be assumed that the absence of obviously working class accents from the news means the absence of working class people from the news.

Maybe. But my favorite professor from my undergraduate days was an excellent scholar of ancient philosophy, and he kept his Bronx accent. It made him less intimidating because it contributed to an air of unpretentiousness.

If the act of displaying a minor character trait that reflects something about who you are is being exclusive, then it’s the kind of exclusion I support. Exclude away, ye minor demons! On the other hand, if people don’t think it’s part of who they are, then they’re free to change their accents, like Stephen Colbert did. It makes no difference to me.

Anything you do is excluding people by virtue of the fact that you’re a unique person doing it. Exclusion is simply not much of an argument on its own. On the one hand, you’re excluding ESL’s; on the other, you’re excluding Southies. Pick your poison.

It might seem strange to advocate exclusion so baldly. But actually I’m finding that that’s what people are calling for. For instance, when a white man says to someone in the pink ghetto, “I totally understand what you’re going through”, they’re not given a warm reception. It doesn’t matter what the white guy’s background is — could be he was homeless for a while, could be he has three degrees in sociology, could be this or that or the other thing — but the underlying message he will reliably get is, “we appreciate your solidarity, but given the lingering qualitative differences between our life experiences, you will always be estranged from us to some degree”. That’s “othering”, I think, because the white guy could feel sad and ashamed when they’re just trying to be helpful. But it’s also the stone cold truth. (Of course, the audience can always try to phrase it in nicer ways, and probably ought to for the purposes of solidarity, but that won’t change the underlying point.)

Right. Barney Frank is doing much the same thing your classics professor was doing. I like that, as I said.

But by ‘exclusion’ I don’t mean the touchy-feely kind, I don’t mean anything about being offended or lacking respect, I just mean that a multitude of accents makes understanding difficult for non-native speakers. I think news programs, in contrast to other kinds, have good reasons for aiming at uniformity of pronunciation so as not to make understanding more difficult than it needs to be. It’s a public service thing. I really think clarity and uniformity should be one of their goals. They could to be sure just decide that all accents would be Bronx accents…but you can see what that would do to their talent pool.

And then, a Bronx accent is not synonymous with working class, and vice versa. Michelle Obama is working class. (Not now – but then anyone reading the news would also not be working class now, in that sense. It’s not accent that makes the difference.)

I think this is all a bit crude, frankly. Most working class people in the US just aren’t detectable by accent. They may be by syntax, but if they are they’re unlikely to be journalists. The lack of Bronx accents on the news just really doesn’t tell us much.

I don’t really know if uniformity of pronounciation has that kind of impact. If that were so then we’d have to scrub British guests from the news, wouldn’t we?

Of course we’re not talking about synonymy. (Hence the Colbert reference still does some work here — he represents South Carolina just fine.) We’re talking about self-representation, choice, and audience acceptance. The only way we would be dealing in crude equivalences is if we thought self-representation was actual representation, or if we were conflating the permissible with the mandatory. I support both of the formers and neither of the latters.

It is a problem, that when you want to maximise communicability you also want to avoid muffling voices that need to be heard, even if they are difficult to understand. I doubt if there is an easy solution. In the old days, when I was able to watch (British) TV (I seldom get the chance now) I was much struck by the number of indubitable experts who spoke in regional accents without regard for anything I would call “grammar”. A favourite archaeological programme, The Time Team (presented by the immortal and definitely regional Tony Robinson) features entirely brilliant experts who speak in every accent but RP — and these are the kind of people who can glance briefly at half-a-centimetre of grubby broken pot and tell you immediately that it is Samian ware of the 2nd century of a kind made locally in Dorset and give you a picture of a reconstructed pitcher of which our tiny chip is an upper portion of the right-hand handle. And if I exaggerate it is ever so slightly.

Maybe one day, when we all end up speaking Seth Efrican or Strine or Brahnx (is that correct?) or (who knows) even Awksfud, that particular problem will go away. In the meantime it’s just another example of the problems we face in reconciling what we learn about the world as children with how it actually is. Meanwhile, it seems to me that the most important of such difficulties is the attitude that if it’s a woman who says it, whatever it is and however she speaks, it isn’t worth listening to. Women, race, class… Basically, it’s all about class, or classification, isn’t it?

Posh of course isn’t just about accent but about growing up with wealth and privilege, access to networks of influence and an expectation of success. About 7% of the population in the UK have a public (i.e. private) and/or Oxbridge education, so this is a pretty good marker for being in the upper strata of society.

Chavs is definitely a description intended for the working class and is not just about young, anti-social behaviour. Cambridge students getting up to high jinks after the May Ball are not identified as chavs. Someone wearing a tracksuit and a baseball cap, having children young, eating fast food or living on a council estate is. Kids who spend their summer sitting on a wall getting drunk and stoned are acting like chavs, kids who spend their summer on the beaches of Goa getting drunk and stoned are not. See what I mean?

Of course, you are right Ophelia, accents are malleable, and need to be understandable, so the mere fact of people with posher than average accents in positions of power and influence does not automatically mean that these professions are dominated by people with a privileged family background. But when people have done the research, the truth is (in the UK at least) that MPs, top civil servants, serious TV/radio presenters, top doctors, CEOs, top academics, newspaper editors etc..all do reflect a predominance of people with elite backgrounds. For example around a third of MPs went to private schools. I haven’t got the other numbers, but Anthony Sampson’s book ‘Who Runs this Place’ traces the predominance of white, male, Oxbridge elite at the top of almost every sphere of public life in the UK.

Anyway, my point was, that the arrogance that Clay Shirky describes as a necessary attribute for getting ahead is something that is taught and is as much part of the ‘class ceiling’ as it is of the ‘glass ceiling’ that women face.

To be honest I’ve been relying on Wikipedia to tell me about what constitutes the regularity of the use of the word. (I’m Canadian, so I have to.) If class is more like a necessary condition in English parlance, and not just a typical one, then I’ll defer to UK usage. Anyway, my aim is to include young middle-class suburban twits who possess the who-gives-a-crap attitude, esp. those that end up as juvies.